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;In a sci-fi world with advanced technology, The Fall Part 2: Unbound is a point and click, action, adventure game. Things follow straight on from the events of the first game, with our hero, called A.R.I.D. an artificial intelligence, left to be decommissioned. And I’d say that even though there is a handy recap at the start, to remind you of the story up til now, it is probably best to play through part one first. Partly because it helps you to understand this world better and partly because it is a great game. So yeah check out part one first. So with her body left in ruins, A.R.I.D.

Only exists in this kind of digital universe. And this setting isn’t quite as fun to explore as the first game was, and almost all of the horror element’s gone now. Really, the only purpose of this world is to access nodes. And nodes let you enter the bodies of these three robots. There’s The Butler, The One and The Companion, who is basically a sex robot.

Now all three of these machines come with their own sets of logic. They have their own perspectives of the world and their own rules of how to behave. So a lot of the game is about manipulating these A.I’s logic to get you to do what you want them to do. For example, The Butler is on a loop of doing household chores over and over again, doing the same routine every day. To make him go where you want, you need to figure out a way to disrupt his routine in some way. To do this, you need to interact with your environment- talk to people, pick up items, click on things.

This all takes place in locations that are quite small, but they do compact a lot into them. You’re constantly going to be going back and forth between rooms, piecing together what you think needs to be done. The puzzles build up in difficulty pretty nicely and some of them do actually take a bit of time to work out. They had me scratching my head a few times and because it’s fairly linear, with most of the problems needed to be solved in a strict order. If you get stuck there’s not a lot of options other than to figure things out.

Eventually, A.R.I.D. starts to learn new ways of thinking, getting lessons from all three of these different machines. She then can use what she learns in the world of one of them, in the world of another. And here’s where things get the most interesting because for example say the solution to a puzzle in The Butler’s world, may not be clear until first, you progress further in The Companion’s. These three machines sort of become a… unlikely group of heroes, like the Tinman, the Scarecrow and the Lion from the Wizard of Oz. Separately, they have flaws, but together, they can… do anything. Once again there are some light combat elements. In the digital universe, A.R.I.D. will have to fight off against viruses; which requires good timing as you have to wait to dodge an attack before the virus leaves itself vulnerable for you to blast away at.

And there’s some hand to hand combat, mainly in The One’s world. It’s a pretty simple two-button control system. But it does a surprisingly good job of making you feel like this martial arts bad ass. And then it builds up in difficulty, with different types of enemy thrown at you, like red ones, which block for example. It reminded me of almost like a rhythm game, having to hit the correct buttons as they come onto the screen at just the right time. The game isn’t the best looking in the world, but I guess it does have a sort of, unique, creepy charm to it. And the voice acting is pretty good. Although, I guess playing an emotionless robot isn’t the hardest of roles.

But they do have some fun with it. As with a lot of adventure games, eventually, I did get stuck, which lead to me doing the classic thing of trying every item on every location and hoping to get lucky. If done flawlessly, the game isn’t going to take too long to complete, but if you do get stuck, it can take around 6 hours.

But The Fall’s biggest strength has got to be its dark sense of humor, and it’s intelligent storytelling. It once again manages to have its fair share of surprises and it builds up nicely for its conclusion in part 3. What will the machines have in store next? Who knows, but I look forward to finding out.